The Long War

Thomas wasn’t here for the flora and fauna, however.

When he felt well enough to stand he walked around the bluff to the cave – it was here just as in the Datum – and knelt down, the Stepper box awkward at his waist. He had to shield his eyes against the light of a descending sun to see inside.

And there it was, in the cave. Somehow he had known it would be. Not his Hunting Man, not exactly. Another human figure chasing another crudely sketched animal. Around it, a different array of spirals and starbursts and hatchings and zigzags. And when he touched the drawing, cautiously, he could feel the patina that covered it. It was every bit as ancient as the one in the Datum. Put there by some scrawny guy who had figured out how to step, all by himself, millennia ago.

He sat with his back to the rock. He would have laughed, save he didn’t want to disrespect the silence, or indeed draw the attention of any nearby marsupial lions. Of course there must have been Aboriginal steppers. Where would an ability to step have been of more use than in the arid heart of Australia? If his ancestors had

been able to exploit a sheaf of worlds, even just in emergencies, the resources available to them would have been multiplied hugely. And they had had sixty thousand years to discover how.

But even so, surely not in such numbers as today. Maybe this was a new Dreamtime, he thought, a replay of the age when the Ancestors had moved across an empty landscape, and in doing so had brought the land itself into being. It was the turn of his generation to become the new Ancestors, to begin a new Dreamtime that might encompass all of the Long Earth.

And this time they would shape a landscape no white colonist could ever appropriate.

So here was Thomas, with a cellphone in his pocket, sitting by a rock, alone in this world.

He could go back and report his bit of archaeology, at last.

Or maybe it was his own time to go walkabout. He could strip down to his boxers, just dump everything, and wander off . . .

Living off the endlessly generous land, he became a comber – this was before the word itself, derived from ‘beachcomber’, had become common currency. In due course he would start to hear legends of Joshua Valienté and other super-steppers, legends that were spreading across the Long Earth, and he would begin to take a more academic view of those who shared his new lifestyle . . . And then he met Joshua himself, in the silence of a very distant America.

‘But all that lay in the future,’ he told Helen now. ‘As I remember it, I just patted the Hunting Man – Hunting Man West 10 – and straightened up, and touched my Stepper, and I was gone for good.’

She smiled. ‘The Long Earth has given us all stories, I guess.’

‘Too right. So what about yours. Tell me about this place Reboot. Another coffee?’

12

T

HEY SPENT THREE more weeks in Valhalla, trying to get Dan used to the place, and to the idea of coming here to school – even though headmaster Jacques Montecute and the taciturn Roberta had in the meantime left for the Datum, to join the Chinese expedition. Helen had plenty of time to sample the local cuisine, including lots more coffee – enough to establish that, whatever Valhalla was good at, coffee wasn’t it.

But that was remedied once they boarded the Gold Dust. In the first twenty-four hours Helen spent most of her time relaxing, sitting in the family’s saloon, sipping the finest coffee she’d drunk since – well, since the last time her father had taken her to a Datum Madison mom-and-pop local coffee shop aged about twelve, before they left the old world behind for good.

That was the Gold Dust for you. It was like the best hotel in all the worlds, she thought, uprooted and drifting in the sky, an eight-hundred-foot-long envelope from which hung a gondola of polished High-Megger hardwood, like one vast piece of furniture. Helen had felt embarrassed just to climb aboard. Even the gangplank was carpeted, and you could have lost their whole Hell-Knows-Where house in the reception hall.

Of course they were honoured guests, Joshua, Dan, Helen, even Bill Chambers – and Sally Linsay, who Helen noticed wasn’t too high-minded to hitch a ride aboard this flying palace. Honoured because of Joshua, of course, the hero explorer. If he wished, the Joshua Valienté could dine out on his legend, but he hardly ever did. Full of contradictions, her Joshua. But when he got offered such treats as this ride in the Gold Dust, he’d learned not to turn them away – that was how Helen had trained him anyhow.

Dan was in his element, of course. He’d wanted to be a twain driver since he could walk, and would run after even the scrubby little local ships that drifted over Hell-Knows-Where. Helen had thought his eyes would pop out when they walked aboard the Gold Dust.